The 34-year-old will appear today before the Joint Jury Court of Appeals, expecting the life sentence at first instance to be “broken” Charalambos Anagnostopoulos accused of murdering his wife of 20 years Caroline Crouch and the killing of their puppy, at their home in Sweet waters on May 11, 2021.

The man sentenced to life and an additional sentence of 11 years in prison and six months in prison, comes to the trial that is expected to begin having changed his defense and hoping for a more favorable decision than the one imposed on him last May by the MOD with a unanimous decision, refusing, also unanimously , to recognize him any mitigating factor.

According to the evidence accepted by the trial court in its decision, the defendant, before murdering her in cold blood, sought complete control over Caroline, not only excluding her from relatives and friends, choosing to live far from the center, in the house in Sweet Waters , but also depriving her of managing her money.

“She was deprived of cash, as a result of which she could not carry out simple transactions of her daily life” is stated in the decision of the MOD. The victim, perceiving that she was in “a dysfunctional relationship… had expressed to the defendant her desire to break up their married life and further had taken steps to look for a residence”.

The calendar held by the 20-year-old mother, according to the judicial authorities, renders invalid the versions of the accused both that he had not pre-planned the crime and that everything happened in “one bad moment”.

Before the court of first instance o 34 years old Baripoinitis, a prisoner of Malandrino prison, fought and finally lost two “battles”: that of changing the condition under which the homicide took place, from “in cold blood” to “in hot blood” and that of identifying the mitigating factor. In the first trial, the pilot did not manage to convince that everything happened under the regime of his intense emotional charge, that he was in a boiling state. He was also not persuaded that he was entitled to recognition of mitigation.

In the trial that, unexpectedly, begins today, the defendant himself, as well as the female lawyer who chose her to represent him, are expected to fight this battle again, hoping that the Appeals will end up with a more favorable judgment for the 34-year-old pilot.

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Against them they will have them parents of Caroline who are raising her daughter who claim that Anagnostopoulos’ sentence should not be reduced “not even by a day”. For them, the 34-year-old will always be their child’s killer, the man “who killed my beautiful daughter in a cowardly act”, as Caroline’s father David Crouch said in an interview asking for “Justice”. He will be the man “who asked me to pay for my child’s coffin” as she told the first court that the victim’s mother Susan Lyrarakis-Crouch, a close friend of hers who testified, told her.

The victim’s side, the 20-year-old’s parents, in the first court were represented by their lawyer as the father is facing serious health problems, while the mother tried to avoid the charge she feared she would pass on to her granddaughter. The defendant’s parents were also absent.

The crime and the “theatre” that shook public opinion

The “crime in Freshwater” had shocked thousands of citizens inside and outside the country, not only because the victim was a British citizen or because of the particular cruelty that the first evidence showed, but mainly because it turned out that what the perpetrator himself displayed as a brutal robbery after murder turned out 37 days later, a heinous murder, a spousal murder.

For a month the 34-year-old claimed that the death of Caroline, who froze to death next to her 11-month-old daughter, as well as the death of the dog Roxy, who was found hanging from the banister of the internal staircase of the house, were the result of a robbery. The 34-year-old was crying to the police, describing the terrifying moments he experienced when the three robbers entered the house, took money and left, leaving behind Caroline Crouch’s 20-year-old wife dead and the dog the woman had adopted.

For 37 days the pilot gave descriptions of the perpetrators and expressed his confidence that the police would find the ruthless robbers to pay for the brutal crime.

The findings of the Police, the victim’s biometric watch, the perpetrator’s mobile phone which revealed his movements inside the house and other data, finally revealed a shocking reality: Anagnostopoulos killed the 20-year-old who was sleeping at 4:30 am on the day in question. with whom he had quarreled almost three hours before. The perpetrator allegedly went on this. For six whole minutes with a pillow he “violently blocked the airways of the sleeping victim” causing the 20-year-old “an agonizing suffocation death”.

The young woman was found with a cloth wrapped around her neck, tied at the back with her baby sleeping on her back.

Those “six minutes” during which the victim struggled to breathe, was punched and jerked to gain breath, was crucial to MOT judges who rejected the 34-year-old’s version of his heated reactions to a heated argument that he had with Caroline. “He was in a calm state of mind,” the Court ruled, “he had time to retreat, but the inhibitory mechanisms did not work,” he ruled on those fatal six minutes, stressing that earlier, the interval from the altercation to the crime completely excludes his “sudden overstimulation emotion” of the perpetrator.

The pilot was arrested immediately after Caroline’s memorial service on June 16, 2021 in Alonissos. A few hours after crying in his mother-in-law’s arms, the 34-year-old confessed that there was never a robbery at his house, that he killed Caroline by suffocation while being emotionally charged after a fight they had and that he hanged her with her belt Roxy to “convince the brutality of the perpetrators”.

He said the same in his 10-hour long testimony in the first court where he tried to convince that the crime he confessed to was committed in the heat of the moment, that he “got confused” when the 20-year-old “made a move” during the fight and he was afraid for the child .

“The argument that he killed in a daze was immediately dispelled from the moment he deposited the child on the body of the dead mother. He was aware of his unimaginable cruelty. He knew that the attention would turn to the child and to him who came out of a bloody robbery unscathed” “answered” the District Attorney of the court of first instance.

“The murder was done for a trivial reason and the defendant cannot even plead swearing on the part of the victim. He put the child to sleep on the sofa and went up to kill…” the Prosecutor had said, who had described the negligence of the 34-year-old as “uncle Diki” to remove the victim’s biometric watch.

The Prosecutor had also emphasized the killing of Roxy, the dog of a few months that had been adopted by Caroline, saying that “The accused quickly organized and killed the dog with unimaginable cruelty. The animal was tortured as well as the girl. The effort of the animal was seen to save himself without succeeding. It was something important to Caroline. As much as the defendant says he loved the animal as Caroline did, it cannot be believed. It was one of the issues that betrayed him. No robber wastes time on to kill thus ritualistically, a little dog. . . .

The first trial for the 34-year-old was closed with the imposition of the maximum possible sentence for both Caroline and the dog, as well as for deceiving the authorities over a number of days.

With the end of the trial expected to begin today, the judges will decide on the outcome for both the 34-year-old and for the people who are still grieving for their child, trying to protect their granddaughter. A baby who, on the morning of the crime, the police found next to his mother’s lifeless body and who, growing up, will want to look for evidence of the “crime in Sweet Waters”.